Stills from The Wandering Dipan. (Image source: French le Monde website)
On the evening of May 24, the 68th Cannes Film Festival came to an end, and after 10 consecutive days of screening, 19 main competition films were released one after another. At the awards ceremony on the same day, the French film "Wandering Dipan" won the Palme d'Or for Best Picture.
"Wandering Dipan" about "anger and fear"
The French newspaper Le Monde reported that after watching Jacques Audiard's "Wandering Dipan", people always unconsciously think of Montesquieu's "Persian Letters", and it is not difficult to find similarities between the two works: the protagonists are from afar and live on French soil. But Montesquieu's work shows is Isfahan's philosophical satire and humor, while in Odia's work we see the anger and fear of the protagonists Dipan, Yarini and Ilaya.
The film tells the story of during the Sri Lankan civil war, The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, soldier Di Pan, who could not bear the devastation of the war, fled to France as a war refugee, along with a young woman, Yalini, a 9-year-old orphan, Ilaya. In order to escape the pursuit of the World Refugee Organization and the French Immigration Agency, they changed their identities and pretended to be a family, hoping to find a peaceful life in France. They were placed in a neighborhood called "Meadows" on the outskirts of Paris, where three former strangers began a new life as a "family of three", where Dipan found a job as a cleaner, the little girl Ilaya went to a French school to learn French, and Jarini became a nanny. But the "meadow" is not an ideal place to settle, because it is inhabited by gangsters and is a black area of a drug-ridden society. The "family", which was originally pieced together, began a difficult and uncertain new life in this "violent" neighborhood.
Although it is not difficult to find humor and irony in the protagonist Dipan, in Odia's works, anger and fear are the consistent "material". "Anger" and "fear" are a good illustration of the protagonist's desire for revenge, and exacerbate the horror of the entire film, as in Odia's previous films Sur mes lèvres (2001) and Un prophète (2009).
Jake Gyllenhaal, a member of the jury at the Cannes Film Festival, reported by France's TF1, said: "I have never seen a film that tells such a sensitive issue in such a way. ”
Another judge, Rossy De Palma, said: "There is a very exciting discovery in The Wandering Dipan: three strangers are forced into exile, and in a very short time, they form a family and learn to love each other. In a very difficult environment, this kind of plot and development is very touching. ”
Director Jacques O'd'Ordía delivered an acceptance speech. (Image source: Reuters)
"Immigration" made the Palme d'Or of French cinema
In The Wandering Dipan, director Odia did not employ well-known actors like Emmanuelle Devos or Romain Duris, but instead adopted 3 non-professional actors, and broke the convention of thrillers, boldly challenging a highly controversial subject, a moral confusion that had been "beaten" a million times: immigrants, who fled to their homeland for various reasons, and in the land they reached, A peaceful life is even more of a luxury. Faced with incomprehensible government and moral quirks, they had to take a posture of resistance.
In fact, this isn't the first time Odia has focused on immigration: the heroine of "The Rhythm of My Heart' Oblivion" is Asian (set in Chinese), "The Prophet" tells the story of an Arab who grows up as a gang leader in a French prison, and by the time of "Wandering Dipan", Odia's perspective has turned to Tamils.
Unlike Abdei Koscius, who also focuses on immigrant themes, Jacques Odia has no distinct immigrant background, which allows his work to maintain a certain objective calmness, a smooth perspective and not indiscriminate, but it may also be because of this origin that each of his works ends with everyone's joy.
Interestingly, in the past 10 years, French cinema has won the Palme d'Or three times, from "Between the Walls" to "Adel's Life" to "The Wandering Dipan", all of which are invariably stories of immigrant backgrounds, which is obviously a reflection of French current politics.
The theme of immigration has always been an important theme of French cinema, and in the past two years, under the political atmosphere of left-wing rule, France has paid more and more attention to the issue of immigration, and such works often appear from the perspective of sympathy for immigrants. France was once a colonial power, and a large number of countries in North and West Africa used French as the official language, and North and West African immigrants occupied an important part of France, which was also the source of many social problems in France.
Phoenix Network reported that the United States Vanity Fair magazine "a word to break the sky", "Wandering Dipan" shoulders a mission, that is, to explore the story behind the current headlines related to the immigration crisis in Europe, and to depict the flesh and blood of those parties. There is almost no racial conflict in the film, but only portrays the common dilemma of the poor people at the bottom.
Jacques Odia himself mentioned in his acceptance speech that the conception and creation of The Wandering Dipan began four or five years ago. "I'm more concerned with creating 'from the eyes of others' and how people see these immigrants around us, such as waiters at restaurants and rose sellers." Of course, it would be better if it could cause people to reflect. ”
Link: Director Jacques Odia
According to public information, Jacques Odia is the son of the well-known French screenwriter Michel Odia, now 63 years old.
This is the fourth time that Jacques Odia has been shortlisted for the Cannes Film Festival, he was shortlisted for the 49th Cannes International Film Festival in 1996 for the film "Homemade Heroes", won the Best Screenplay; in 2009, he was shortlisted for the 62nd Cannes International Film Festival with the film "The Prophet", which won the Grand Jury Prize; the most recent was in 2012 with "Rust and Bone" at the 65th Cannes International Film Festival, although it did not win, but the film won a good reputation.
(Editor: No. 11)